Anonymous Hacks Gawker Media Properties in Support of WikiLeaks?

December 11, 2010

At 3:29 p.m. on Saturday, Gawker posted a one-line link to President Obama calling WikiLeaks “deplorable.” Minutes later, someone purporting to be from the 4chan-affiliated hacker group Anonymous started tweeting from the Twitter account of Gawker Media’s tech site Gizmodo, claiming to have stolen 1.5 million email addresses and passwords from Gawker.com, Gizmodo.com and Lifehacker.com. Three follow-up tweets came minutes after, one reading simply “#wikileaks” and another “SUPPORT WIKILEAKS.” The third said, “I remember when Gawker.com told Anon that they were invincible and couldn’t be hacked. Well, you were wrong :)” All have since been deleted. Screenshots and an update after the jump.

UPDATE, 12/11/2010: The Gizmodo account appears to be back to normal, brushing it off as a compromised password: “Looks like our Twitter password was so hungover after the holiday party that it wandered into the wrong hands…” None of the other sites or their respective Twitters appear to have been bothered, at least from the outside. We’ve reached out to the editors of Gawker, Gizmodo and Lifehacker for more information about the supposedly stolen email addresses.

Well, that was almost fun. Gawker’s director of editorial operations tweets: “There’s no evidence to suggest any Gawker user accounts were compromised, and passwords encrypted / not stored in plain text anyway.”